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Parental Anxiety Prospectively Predicts Fearful Children’s Physiological Recovery from Stress

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Abstract

Parental anxiety confers risk for the development of an anxiety disorder in children, and this risk may be transmitted through children’s stress reactivity. Further, some children may be more vulnerable to reactivity in the presence of parent factors such as anxiety. In this study, we examined whether parents’ anxiety symptoms prospectively predict school-aged children’s physiological reactivity following stress, assessed through their electrodermal activity (galvanic skin response) during recovery from a performance challenge task, and whether this varies as a function of children’s temperamental fearfulness. Parents and their children (N = 68) reported on their anxiety symptoms at Time 1 of data collection, and parents characterized the extent to which their children had fearful temperaments. At Time 2 children completed the performance challenge and two recovery tasks. Greater parental anxiety symptom severity at Time 1 predicted children’s higher electrodermal response during both recovery tasks following the failure task. Further, these effects are specific to children with medium and high fearful temperament, whereas for children low in fearfulness, the association between parent anxiety and child reactivity is not significant. Findings provide additional evidence for the diathesis–stress hypothesis and are discussed in terms of their contribution to the literature on developmental psychopathology.

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Notes

  1. Importantly, in order to ascertain whether the observed pattern of effects was specific to parent anxiety symptoms on the BSI or psychopathology more generally, we reran our models using parents’ total symptom scores on the BSI. This total score was not significantly associated with children’s reactivity during recovery, strengthening our confidence in the specificity of the observed effects.

  2. Given that our sample was 90 % mothers, we also reran our analyses using mothers only. All effects remained significant and the p values decreased when we reduced the sample to mothers. The positive association between mother anxiety and child reactivity during Solvable 2 and Symbol Matching was again statistically significant only for children with moderately and highly fearful temperaments.

  3. Due to the fact that the majority of the sample consisted of Hispanic parent–child dyads and given the paucity of developmental psychopathology research on this population, we reran our analyses with only these dyads to see if the findings held. All of the findings remained statistically significant with this reduced sample, and the fearful temperament × parent anxiety interaction effects became stronger (Solvable 2 GSR: b = 3.91, ΔR 2 = 0.03, p = .0009; Symbol Matching GSR: b = 6.33, ΔR 2 = 0.08, p = .0005). The pattern of the moderation effects was identical—the positive association between parent anxiety and child GSR held only among moderately and highly fearful children.

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  1. Pomona College, 647 N. College Way, Claremont, CA, 91711, USA

    Jessica L. Borelli, Patricia Smiley, Madeleine DeMeules, Laura Perrone, Nicole Welindt & Hannah F. Rasmussen

  2. Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA

    D. Kyle Bond & Katherine V. Buttitta

  3. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Jessica L. West

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Borelli, J.L., Smiley, P., Bond, D.K. et al. Parental Anxiety Prospectively Predicts Fearful Children’s Physiological Recovery from Stress. Child Psychiatry Hum Dev 46, 774–785 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-014-0519-6

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